Shown above is the final concept for a service for individuals to use throughout their lifetime that normalizes the topic of death, collects and organizes meaningful verbal and physical mementos, and progressively delivers these mementos to those in grief from an organized repository.

This service is a user-defined experience, offering recipients different landscapes for engaging through a journaling feature, heirloom index, and mourning stone.

The journaling feature is a low-pressure repository for thoughts, that promotes documentation of the everyday. It acknowledges the importance of voice, handwritten sentiments, and tone. This should be a service that is separate from social media. Users are instructed to log their memories via photos, words, and handwritten notes: these memories are of varying significance and privacy to the writer, which is denoted through the post's opacity and position off the timeline. f

Based on different privacy levels, a user's public profile may look a little like this

Coupled with this journaling feature is the heirloom index. This is a digital platform for submitting (by both the mourners and the mourned) objects, artifacts, and heirlooms to be annotated with meaningful stories, messages, and sentiments by the person passing away. Friends and family of a user are able to submit objects that they'd like to know more about, which the user writes about in the drafting section of the service.

This heirloom index promotes conversations between the mourners and the mourned, before and after death. Messages behind these sentimentally charged objects will, as a result, be slowly discovered throughout the grieving process. This system brings forth new stories, new messages, and new experiences even after a death has occurred.

As a facilitator for these services and their planned discoveries, the mourning stone therapeutic object that is passed on from generation to generation. These stones are a physical representation of the grieving process, used by generations and generations of users who find solace in the same artifact their lost loved ones have.

In my research, interviews and casual discussion about conversations about death, people often report that the first discussion they have about death with their parents is “Go around the house and claim what you’ll want when I die”. While this might seem morbid, physical objects are a very stable foundation to jump off from when beginning the death preparation process. Conversations aims to both facilitate this activity in a meaningful way by allowing both parties to attach history and meaning to possessions, recording the information for posterity, and strengthening their interpersonal bond as a result.

Participants (presumably an elderly parent and their adult child), each draw a card from a deck. On the front of the cards, there are prompts such as

a reminder of a happy time

a reminder of a difficult time

a reminder of a time we shared

a reminder of my childhood

a reminder of you

a reminder of a major event

Participants either split up and find the item, if it is on display or in accessible storage, or think of the item if it is not readily available. They then fill out the back of the card with information about the object, where and when the acquired it, and why they chose it for the prompt. Participants then regather — immediately, or after days or weeks (or one family gathering to another) and discuss their objects as they relate to the prompt, the history of their objects, and the future of their objects. The card can then be stored with the object to be passed down to whoever inherits it.

This activity will provide a bonding experience for participants as well as provide an opportunity to record important information about an individual’s story that can be passed down to future generations

Below is a prototype for the system architecture that promotes foresight before death. It's reminiscent of a journal entry, logged throughout the life of an individual. It works in conjunction with the mourning stone to prompt those in grief to seek solace in interacting with this stone, eventually acting as a cue/key to the messages amassed throughout the years of the deceased's life.

Below is an illustration of the objectives of this independent study. This project will aim towards developing a service that promotes collaborative planning, and conversations about death, that eventually manifest in an artifact that prompts further use of the service to facilitate the postmortem experience.

These artifacts function as part of a potential, sustainable substitute for traditional modern grieving practices. They are worry stones are crafted from marble remnants of local gravestone makers. Each stone is intended to facilitate the post-mortem experience by allowing the mourner to interact with a symbolic artifact in remembrance of a loved one.

Current mortuary practices impose huge costs on loved ones as well as the environment; funerals become a platform through which people display how much they loved the deceased through expensive woods for coffins and flowers for bouquets.

In contrast, the stone’s finish changes overtime, becoming a visual and interactive gauge for the time after the death of the loved one.

This map is from the point of view of the individual that will eventually die, though family members may be the ones to initiate the first conversation. It is a hard balance to strike between the “right” way to have these conversations and the “real” way these conversations happen, because nearly all factors that impact these conversations are circumstantial.

In creating this map I had to be very mindful that this timeline may only be applicable to the American middle class way of life (especially with regards to the medical and legal timeline represented, but also in the way that we are expected to relate to our family, spirituality, and the way we may prioritize or personal wishes over what may be “traditional”.

Categories

Social: Conversations we have with our family and friends about what we want them to know, what we need from them, and gaining closure.

Personal: Considerations we contemplate personally that inform the conversations we have with others

Logistical: Determining practical aspects of communication including when, where, and with whom conversations will happen.

Legal and Medical: Though separate, these categories are put together because they impact each other and may be handled or facilitated by professionals that work together to solve issues such as a lawyers, social workers, and doctors.

Spiritual: Conversations had and actions taken with a member of the clergy

Funerary: Preparations made for a funeral, shiva, or memorial service. This category may be subject to the most change from case to case based on tradition, willingness to address mortality, and timeliness of death.

Time Periods

Preparation: Possibly the longest period of time, preparation begins when you become aware of your own mortality and become an active participant in preparing for your eventual departure.

Anticipation: Anticipation begins when death is a tangible, approaching event, though this may come at a different time for every person. This may be when someone becomes immobile and unable to care for themselves, when they are diagnosed with a terminal illness, when they are told there is no more viable treatment and should enter hospice.

Conclusion: Conclusion is (hopefully) the shortest period of time. It begins when the dying process begins, and ends when death is complete.

During this semester, we will be analyzing common practices in mourning the dead in different cultures, through different time periods. This research will be used towards developing a new way to mourn the dead to accommodate different causes of death in a sustainable way. This redesign of mourning will be a response to a shift in digital personal content and modern technology.

The goal of this project is to create a system and/or service that can represent the life of a loved on in a satisfactory, whole, and meaningful manner. This will be a means to facilitate the grieving process in a healthy way.

Methods of Mourning

This is the documented progress of an independent study by designers Vivian Qiu and Lea Cody researching current methods of mourning to design a new way of dying with an emphasis on planning on normalizing conversations about death.